“We want to bring about long-term growth and opportunity for all our stakeholders, including... and the communities and countries in which we operate... We never compromise on safety.” The words on the website of $64 billion mining giant Glencore ring hollow in the ears of the inhabitants of Kabwe, the village where, in 2019, a tanker carrying sulphuric acid to Glencore’s Mutanda copper mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, turned over, killing 21 and seriously injuring seven. With the resulting court case mired in delay in the Court of Cassation in Kinshasa, director Milo Rau has opted to take the case to the court of public opinion in Glencore’s home country, with a new opera, Justice, at the Grand Théâtre de Genève.
Composer Hèctor Parra shows an unerring feel for a vocal line, consistently producing arias and choruses which appeal to the ear and to the emotions. Underlying the voices is an orchestral score which ebbs and flows with immense power at some moments, high tension in others, quiet lyricism elsewhere. Parra’s music is thoroughly enjoyable, never boring and never falls into the trap of unnecessarily sustained stridency.
The music was well served by a full-hearted orchestral performance and an excellent singing cast. The pick of the male voices was Sir Willard White, deep, rich and full of authority as the Priest. Peter Tantsits and Idunnu Münch gave compelling performances as the erratic Director and his well-intentioned wife. Axelle Fanyo, as the Mother of the dead child, got the best lyric lines and made the most of them, tugging at the heartstrings with a full-cream soprano.
Parra spent a great deal of time and effort immersing himself in the culture and music of Central Africa, visiting the area of Kabwe many times to gather songs and make recordings of local music. But to someone with little knowledge of African music, little sense of “Africanness” has survived the conversion to an orchestral score. The one thing that was blatantly African was electric guitarist Kojak Kossakamvwe, sitting by the side of the stage playing a driving beat with extraordinary virtuosity, often solo, sometimes accompanying the orchestra, often generating exceptionally smooth flow from the two-handed “tapping” technique.
Rau, Parra and librettist Fiston Mwanza Mujila have set themselves some lofty ambitions. Telling the story of one incident isn’t enough; they aim to give a voice to all of Africa, to all people blighted by colonial exploitation that still thrives in the hands of multinational corporations, long after independence. To do this, they opt for allusive, poetic text and a semi-fictionalisation. The setting is an imaginary dinner, hosted by the Director and his wife, to launch a project to build a local village; they are desperate to be a force for good and carry the “white man’s burden”. Contrasting their rose-coloured views are the memories of the survivors, their lawyer and the driver of the tanker, sung to Mujila’s poetic, allusive text. Interleaved with this fictional setting is documentary material about the real incident: footage taken at the time, video of Parra and Rau’s visits to the village, words from the actual survivors. Adding authenticity, the “Boy who lost both legs” is sung by Serge Kakudji, who hails from nearby Kolwezi and himself still bears the scars of a (less serious) sulphuric acid spillage.
It’s an uneasy marriage of fact and fiction. There is little narrative progression or even emotional progression. The juxtaposition of the various testimonies, hopes and fears seems arbitrary and doesn’t build understanding or heighten tension in any consistent way. The victims are indeed given a voice, but it’s not an eloquent voice; my imagination of the horrors of losing a child in these circumstances or of becoming a useless cripple was little changed in the course of the opera. And the work’s value as a polemic is diminished by an unwarranted even-handedness. In attempting to empathise with the drunken tanker driver, the ineffectual lawyer and the corporate director, who are the real villains of the piece, the opera pulls its punches.
Rau, Parra and Mujila don’t seem to have trusted their opera’s ability to tell the story. The opera was preceded by a sort of musical Powerpoint presentation (accompanied by Kossakamvwe’s guitar) in which Mujila and Kakudji told us the historical events and introduced each of the main singers with an explanation of each one’s African heritage or other link to their role.
I wish the creators of Justice well in their crowdfunding campaign to help the survivors and victims’ families, which is certainly a worthy cause. But in spite of appealing music and some fine singing, the need for that opening presentation tells you that as a work of music drama, Justice fails to do its job.
David's accommodation in Geneva was funded by the Grand Théâtre de Genève
